Um.. is there any hope of these titles being made available outside the United States? Or any future CDramas being made available outside the United States? Will this be a trend (making shows only available to Americans) for titles of all types in the future? I apologize if I'm overreacting I'm just wondering.

kronoskingwrote: Um.. is there any hope of these titles being made available outside the United States? Or any future CDramas being made available outside the United States? Will this be a trend (making shows only available to Americans) for titles of all types in the future? I apologize if I'm overreacting I'm just wondering.

From what I can tell, Crunchyroll gets rights from two types of sources. One source is the original creator, or their agent, and they have the ability to grant rights widely ~ worldwide, unless there are agreements already in place that lock some parts of the world out. Those are the ones that Crunchyroll streams to as many countries as it can get the rights owner to agree to.

For those, Crunchyroll has been very successful for the UK and Ireland, Netherlands, the Nordic countries, Portugal and Brazil, has some success with Spanish America, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philppines, the Middle East, Africa, and is really struggling in the rest of Europe and the rest of Asia.

The second source is a licensee for some country or part of the world. They can only give rights for the country or countries that they have licensed. For DVD licensees, this normally means the US and Canada.

Since TaiSeng has a heavy focus on Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin) content on cable, in the US, it only licenses material for the US, so when TaiSeng is the source for C-dramas and other KaiSeng content, its US only.

Does that mean there is no hope? Well, it does mean tha tmean that KaiSeng won't be the source. That means that any progress will grind along on the slow pace of new business deals. If a UK licensee hired Crunchyroll to do the same thing they did for TaiSeng, but in the UK, then if there was overlap in what shows they carried, Crunchyroll could approach them to add UK rights to a Crunchyroll stream.

As you can see, there are lots of "ifs", so its far from a sure thing. But its not impossible.

And for all these other comments ...

TsanGwanWaiwrote: YES. Oh wait only in the US?! What no! Finally I thought I could watch something I could comprehend without subtitles :(

stuff55wrote: I was going to say 'Awesome!', until I read that they were only available in the US.

Ditto ... it seems to me that when the streaming rights come secondhand from a source that only licenses for the US, adding more countries is much harder than when the streaming rights come from the original source.